This is why:
Colors good. It's sharp and crips. The soft curves are great, but the thing that really matters here is the compositon. It's very good and whether it's cropped in the LCD, viewfinder or at the PC really doesn't matter. Does it! Great idea of rotating the image a bit!

I really would like to see some shots of this with a deep blue sky behind, but I guess that's not up to humans to decide.

Unfortunalty these shots have been taken early in the morning without a direct light.
I think best thing for this kind of subject would have been at noon: saturated colors, strong contrast and , yes, a deep blue sky

Beside using flash at shooting time I have tried to enhance levels and saturation in PS but I reached very soon the noise-point

This shot, beside showing the actual dimension of the needle, better illustrate the bad lighting conditions ( even if it was a little bit lighter ).